Adobe HTML5 Camp 2011
I was recently lucky enough to be able to attend the Adobe HTML5 Camp in the UK which took place on , and I must say I enjoyed it immensely. There were some great speakers (and one not so great) and I learnt a lot more about some of the products that Adobe (and Google) were showcasing.
The State of the Web - Jeremy Keith
Now I'm not someone you would consider as being a massive fan of Adobe products. Photoshop is slow and clunky and suffers from bloat, Illustrator has not improved greatly over the years and has some odd quirks and Flash is a bubmling behemoth full of features I'm not going to use with an interface that looks like it's been designed by someone whoknows that they'll never have to use the program. Obviously, it was going to take more than a few extra features to change my mind about their products in general. Some of my sentiment to their software was echoed by the first speaker, Jeremy Keith, who gave a talk on "The State of the Web". Jeremy wasn't a fan of some of their software either, albeit for different reasons. He started talking about general design practices when creating websites, which led to him talking about the typical attitude as he saw it towards the design process.
Jeremy argued that products like Dreamweaver make the development process harder, as it (and software like it) is not a WYSIWYG tool, but a WYSIWTF. After the initial titters from the audience died down, he explained why he felt this way, and a good argument he made. Each time we use software like Dreamweaver to develop a website, or Photoshop to draw up a design, we are imposing false limits on the web canvas to exert some control over the medium. We feel that we have some control over the size of the screen the visitors are using, we make assumptions on the capabilities of their browsers, we even make the assumption that they are using a screen to visit the website, which reflects on something I've believed for a long time, accessibility is key.
The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.
He made the very valid point that you can't make any such assumptions, and that it's just now with the abundance of mobile devices and tablets that we are really seeing that there is nothing about our visitors that we can take for granted. I must admit, I was among the group that felt that a few media queries in my CSS would handle the visual variety of devices out there and accessible code would handle the rest. I realised after his talk that there's a whole lot more to it than that, as tools such as the W3C mobileOK Checker show (and incidentally I'll be addressing those issues on my own site soon.)
Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5 - Greg Rewis
The next speaker was the worldwide Adobe Creative Suite evangelist Greg Rewis. His talk was all on Dreamweaver CS 5.5, introducing its new features. Aside from his incorrect statement that it's a simple process of converting an existing HTML4 website to HTML5 by jsut changing the doctype (as I found out when all my previous blog posts that had used the <acronym> tag were failing the W3C Validator) the talk was quite good. I like the new live view option available which uses a built in WebKit rendering engine, although I do worry that some people may assume it replaces the job of proper testing (IE, Opera, Fx anyone?). The mobile app development is particularly useful, and the way it integrates with Jquery Mobile and Phone Gap particularly nice. If you use Dreamweaver already then you'll probably want to upgrade. If not, there's nothing in this version that you can't do without it, but it does make things easier and brings a lot of tools into one platform.
Chrome Developer Tools - Sam Dutton
Following Greg (and a short break in which I had enough time for half my lunch) was a speaker from Google Chrome called Sam Dutton. His presentation didn't go as smoothly as he'd hoped (although not as badly as some, but more on that later,) but in the main it went down very well. The new features in Chromes version of Firebug are amazing, ranging from code beautifiers for minified Javascript, right up to audit tools to find unused CSS and memory and CPU profilers. It has seriously made me think about changing my default development environment away from Firefox. The new features are available in the nightly builds, but I don't think we'll have to wait too long before they hit the next mainstream release.
Edge Demo - Mark Anders
The demo for Adobe Edge was so good that I actually didn't mind the whole seminar running over time (which it was by this time of the day!) Everything I'd heard about this before was that it was basically Flash for the HTML5/CSS3/Javascript stack, but it was as different from that as Photoshop and Illustrator. The interface has been built with HTML and CSS in mind, not as some sort of basterdised Flash interface, and the ease of which working examples were put together was something Flash just doesn't have any more. What really sold it to me though as a viable alternative to Flash that actually lived up to its promises was the code it produced, which Mark Anders showed us towards the end of his time slot. Even after importing an existing site (from a pre-built template downloaded off of one of these library sites) and applying some simple effects to a couple of large sections of the site, the resultant HTML was the same except for a couple of extra Javascript libraries. It was a brilliant example of progressive enhancement, and a good example of the promise this product shows. It's definitely something I will be playing with in my spare time, I just have to see if I can get it to run under Wine.
How does Adobe Help with HTML5 Developement? - Bhakti Pingale
I have to feel sorry for Bhakti Pingale; she was given the weakest products to speak about, was the last speaker on an already overrunning seminar, her main topic (Adobe Muse) was a product aimed at non developers and the audience was largely developers or at least those familiar with HTML and after Jeremy Keiths talk earlier in the afternoon the Muse was looking even less attractive. The second product, Wallaby, was not something I felt should be a program in its own right, but more of an integrated tool for Flash, as it's only purpose is to (badly) convert a .fla file into a HTML5/CSS3/Javascript stack of files. The examples given in the presentation were less than inspiring, and weren't even something that could compete well with Swiffy.
Lastly she spoke about some new CSS regions for flowing text, with some simple examples, of flowing text into containers and wrapping around custom shapes. I can see where this would be useful, as CSS has lacked any sort of support for this beyond basic floating and box-wrapping.
The camp was great, and while I'm likely to only use one of their (Adobe's that is, I was already using Google Chrome) products that appeared in the seminar (I'll give you a clue, it's not Muse!) I am talking about them to people, so Adobe (and Google) can count this as a success on their part too.